1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a portable terminal such as a cellular (cell) phone, and more particularly, to a portable terminal having display buttons for displaying images corresponding to specific functions through keys pressed by a user, and a method of inputting functions of the portable terminal using the display buttons.
2. Description of Related Art
A portable terminal user selects a function such as a phone call or short message send/receive function and inputs, for example, Korean characters, English characters, and digits, using a plurality of buttons on the portable terminal.
Recently portable terminals such as cell phones have been developed to integrate and fuse functions of many other electronic devices in addition to basic functions such as a phone call function and a short message function. For example, functions such as an MP3 audio file reproduction function of an MP3 player, image capture and reproduction functions of a digital camera, an electronic dictionary function, and a digital TV function, have been included in recent cell phones.
Such a function increase of a portable terminal accompanies an increase of devices for controlling the functions, but users do not usually want extra complexity, cost or physical size.
Though it is not that difficult to integrate several functions into a portable terminal or to miniaturize a device, due to the development of technology, it is still challenging to provide a user interface through which a user can quickly and easily input complex functions and then control the portable terminal. For example, a user interface is needed for reducing key-press steps for a user to perform a specific function, or for easily managing, searching for, and reproducing digital content such as photographs, video, audio, and e-mails.
For portable terminals, an increasing number of buttons for inputting the extra functions can be a problem, due to complexity of user input according to the limited size and greater number of buttons. On the other hand, without extra buttons, the number of key presses for inputting a specific function increases.